A sort of progress report or putting some thoughts aside for later

It’s the first day of June.

I have three rough drafts, each one progressively rougher. I have just under 62,000 words. Most significantly, I have a daily habit that has somehow programmed my body to wake itself an hour earlier each day (and yes that means later on the weekends, but before whatever commitment or plan has been booked for my Saturday or Sunday) to sit at the dining room table and write old school. On paper with an actual pen. I have almost filled the second notebook.

I started this at the end of March. I actually lost track. Because I’m not really keeping score with numbers… and the word count was a very recent recognition as I typed up my notebook pages. It isn’t about the numbers… yet. It’s about writing a story. Three, four, five stories that all connect somewhere.

I want to tell everyone everything. But I can’t. Firstly, I’m not done yet. Secondly, I really like to write twists into my novels (in case you didn’t read An Ever Fixed Mark).

I am, however, going to put down a few things to get started. Some actually deserve a blog post or three all on their own. But they are thoughts clunking around in my head that need to be saved for later, either in fiction or contemplation of this fiction.

So, as I have said, I am writing a series of novels where traveling through time is a major element. Except, each novel is one visit. So, like an episode of Dr. Who, you have to stay put until the problem of the chosen point in history is resolved… or somewhat resolved. Or really, there isn’t much resolution. My time travel is more of an observation. No saving the world or creating hiccups in the space time continuum. A lot of it, really, is me inserting a character – a FEMALE character – with modern sensibilities into a time where her intelligence, her disdain for shoes, her red hair, her tattoo, her lack of knowledge about laundry, her sexuality, her knowledge of what is to come in later decades all present certain challenges to living the day to day.

Fortunately, she doesn’t always remember all of that. There is a little bit of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind thrown in the transition between times. But there is no rhyme or reason. So some times she knows where she has been before or what she is or why there is a mark on her back or that kissing a boy (or girl) doesn’t send you to hell. That’s the easy conflict of the memory trope. The grayer, more complicated details are why she forgets. Why do we let ourselves forget things. How we hurt one another. How others have hurt us. Why we run away from truth in the first place.

The fantasy of all this is based in magic. Ancient magic. Magic of the fae or the sidhe or the aos si. Not Tinkerbelle fairies. (Blech). Nor as I found myself watching a 2012 episode this weekend, the sort you saw on True Blood. The beauty of ancient magic is I can define how I want my magical creatures to be… or not be. What their magic is or what it cannot do. And no, my heroine and her hero are not magical creatures. In my research, I was very much taken with the stories of changelings. They are really quite tragic to think upon – especially when contemplating the belief is only recently eradicated. But the stories are always about the parents or husbands who are left behind. Not about the children or young women who are taken. What would happen if one of them wanted to come back? And why would she want to leave paradise? Or a world where she wouldn’t be judged for being a woman, for showing her ankles, for having red hair, for having a lover?

Of course, this is a series of novels I am writing. And while certainly there is romance, the decades in which they land are not full of kilts or empire dresses with a Darcy clone hanging out at the ball. I’ve been researching indentured servitude and life in a corset factory and abolition and the Intolerable Acts and Bloody Sunday (the 1972 Belfast version) and magical waters that run deep in the forest of Central Massachusetts.

I’ve contemplated the idea of (selective) remembering and the eternity of moments and the very thin, very fine line between love and hate.

I appreciate the fantasy so my history has the permission to not be obnoxiously detailed perfection. But I seek to understand it through cooking a recipe in my kitchen or contemplating the seams in my machine woven clothing. I’ve found a scene while pulling up thorny weeds. I have the most varied playlist. I am obsessed with Turn on AMC. And Ken Burns documentaries. I go to museums on my days off.

And I write. I write every day. I’m totally besotted with my characters and their journeys. So much that I fear this blog has taken me away from them too long.